OSX

I have been doing quite a lot of manuscript editing recently and realize that many people—including academics—don’t understand the differences between the symbols hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash. So here is a quick explanation: hyphen (-): is used to join words (“music-related”). You type this character with the Minus key on the keyboard, so it is the easiest one to use. en-dash (–): is used to explain relationships between two concepts (“action–couplings”) or in number series (0–100)....

Apple’s Keynote has been my preferred presentation tool for about a decade. For a long time it felt like the ideal tool, easy to use, powerful and flexible. But at some point, probably around the time when the iOS version of Keynote came along, the Mac version of Keynote started loosing features and became more limited than it had used to be. Since then, I have experienced all sorts of problems, including non-compatibility of new and old presentation file versions, problems with linked video files, crashes, etc....

Last year I decided to use plain text files (TXT) as the main file type for all my computer text input. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important one was all the problems experienced when trying to open other types of text-based files (RTF, DOC, etc.) on various iOS and Android devices that I use daily. Another reason is to become independent of specific software solutions, forcing you to use a specific software for something as basic as writing text on your computer or device....

MultiControl is by far the most popular software application I have created, as can be seen in the web traffic here on my site, and also on the download site at the University of Oslo where the app resides. This is a tiny application that passes on data from a human interface device (mouse, game controller) through either OSC or MIDI. When I first created it back in 2004, there were not so many other options....

This is quite certainly the least advanced computer software I have made publicly available (see here for others), but it may still be useful for some: a small application that will ask for a filename and create a new blank text file with that filename prepended by today’s date: If you are interested in trying this out, here are the files: New text file (app) New text file (source - Automator workflow) Over the last years I have become more and more vary of the problems of complex file formats, and find myself using plain text files for most things, including to-do lists and note taking....

When creating figures for papers written in LaTeX, I have found it aesthetically unpleasing to have different fonts in the figures than in the text. Most figures I create in either OmniGraffle or Matlab, and here I have relied on regular OSX fonts. Fortunately, I have discovered that it is possible to use LaTeX fonts in OSX. Apparently, this is now included as a feature in the latest version(s) of the MacTeX distribution (?...

I haven’t really played much with Automator earlier on, but have found it to be very useful for doing small things that you would otherwise need to write a small shell script or program to do. Here is a screenshot of an Automator workflow which will add today’s date to the name of any file or folder. Very easy!

Here is how to create a USB drive for installing OSX.6 from a DMG file: Open Disk Utility Select your USB drive Select the “Restore” pane Choose your source DMG file Drag and drop your USB drive on the destination (I don’t understand why this isn’t already selected…). You should probably also select “Erase destination” From the “Images” menu, choose “Scan Image for Restore”. This will then check that your image is working....

To organize files I have for a while been creating folder names that start with today’s date. I typically create a number of folders each day, and had grown tired of doing this manually. Then I came across a page describing the wonders of Automator, and decided to give it a try. It all is very simple. I create a small automator script containing the following two elements: Then I saved it as an application and told Quicksilver where to find it....

I just installed Adobe Reader on my new computer, only to discover that it hijacked the PDF preview window in TextMate when working on LaTeX documents. This also happened the last time I installed a new system, and I couldn’t remember what I did to change it back to using Preview as the default PDF viewer. After googling around, I remembered that TextMate is just using the regular browser settings when it comes to displaying PDF files....